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Miserere mei, Deus

Introduction

Miserere mei, Deus is an ambitious five-part sacred cantata, a setting of parts of the Vulgate Psalm 50 (51 in modern psalters). There are five sections and exactly four hundred bars. Three of the sections are eighty-six bars long. The centre point in terms of bar numbers is at bar two hundred where the text ceases to focus on sin and asks God to create in the supplicant a pure heart, the word ‘heart’ (‘cor’) being at the heart of the work. It occurs at the first vocal entry following a brief but highly personal and emotional recitative, the only recitative in the whole cantata.

Clearly, the structure is organized on numerical principles, of which the primary one is the name for God ‘Elohim’ which, in the Hebrew alphabet, adds up to 86. The total of 400 represents completion, it being the number assigned to the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

Psalm 51 is a Psalm of David composed as a penance for his adultery with Bathsheba—an adultery which he followed up by putting her husband Uriah in the front line of the army so he would be killed. The heading of the Psalm makes this clear, referring to the prophet Nathan’s demand for David’s penance.

Clerk, in chosing to set this Psalm, must have been well aware of its meaning. When he put at its heart a personal recitative (he alters the original word order to make it even more expressive), we can only conclude that he felt he too had sinned. Had he committed adultery and does this cantata act as a sacred counterpart to Dic mihi saeve puer where he sought to escape the wiles of Cupid? Or was there another symbolism in this—a kind of adultery with the Roman Catholic Church while he was in Rome? Clerk wrote to his father at this time:

You may perhaps think I have a dangerous person beside me when my Cousin is not only a catholic but a Fryer of the order of St Francis, for after the battle of Kilecrankie he came to Italy.

We know Clerk attended Mass in the Sistine chapel where ‘the musick was exceedingly divine, being the compositions of the famous Palestrina’. His life had been saved by nuns who had nursed him when he had smallpox. Had he been too deeply impressed for his own liking by the fact that the Roman Church and its adherents had offered him not only family ties and musical inspiration, but life itself? The answer to these questions may lie in other symbolic aspects of this work, but they await elucidation.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love, according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.

Against you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak, and justified when you judge. Surely I have been a sinner from birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.

Surely you desired truth, you taught me the deepest parts of your wisdom.

Cleanse me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness, let the bones you have crushed rejoice.

Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity. Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence. or take the holy spirit from me.